The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Runner up - Sue Hubbard

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic who writes regularly for The Independent. Twice winner of the London Writers Competition, she has published two collections of poetry. Everything Begins with the Skin, Enitharmon and Ghost Station, Salt. She was the Poetry Society’s Public Art poet and composed the poem Eurydice for the South Bank. Her first novel Depth of Field is published by Dewi Lewis. She is the recent recipient of a major Arts Council Award.

Symmetry

For C

Your need for form takes over,
the precision of black trouser belt

straightened to the edge of
boxer shorts, white fields of paper

set square, as if such
rituals of alignment might ward off

ancient hurts buried deep
as sapphires in the mineral

dark of some dark Indian mine.
Your world is a cracked mirror

where the checking
and rechecking of closed

refrigerators doors, the back
windows bolted lock, those three

turns of the washthroom tap before
the scrubbing of clean hands

might reconstruct some necessary
order, give answers

to those questions
you don’t even understand

as you run from a God
you can no longer trust,

rinsing the taste of shit you fear
lingering on your lips.

I don’t know what I want
from you here in this

darkening room amid
these shadows of fading

October light; just to take
your brown hand in my white and lay

our palms edge to edge
to measure the span of friendship,

its exact alignment as Galileo once
measured the distance between sun and moon,

the earth and far-off stars,
then close your fingers in a fist

disrupting the precise symmetry –
like this, like this.